Microsoft has been making it clear for several years that it will cut off support for Windows XP on April 8th, 2014. The 12 year old operating system is still being used by a large percentage of PC owners and with just over six months to go before that support termination date is reached, some Windows XP users are still finding bugs.

One such issue was recently reported by Neowin community member "warwagon" in our forums. He wrote that he has been dealing with an issue that has caused SVCHOST to push the CPU to 100 percent usage in clean installs of Windows XP SP3. He writes:

I don't know about anyone else, but within the last year MS did something to Windows update for XP which has caused, even on fresh installs, SVCHOST to RAPE the CPU at 100%. For the past 2 years I've been using the same XP install Sp3 discs. On a fresh install I would run windows updates it would check for updates and under 30 seconds it would ask for the WGA update and then would proceed to show me the other 100 updates. Now even on clean installs SVCHOST molests the CPU at 100% for a good 4+ Minutes before showing you the updates. You click install and then before it downloads them it molests the CPU at 100% for another few mins.

A number of other Neowin forum members have also reported the same issue popping up with their own Windows XP copies in that same forum thread. Microsoft released a patch to fix the exact same bug with Windows XP back in 2007, but that was for the SP2 version of the operating system. The reason for the same bug occurring with Windows XP SP3 has yet to be discovered.

Neowin has emailed Microsoft to see if they have a comment on this bug and if they will have time to fix it before the April 8th, 2014 cut off date.